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Water in Motion

Words like Tide

Good Tidings
In Old English the rise and fall of the sea was NOT called tide. The rise of tide was called flód. Consider the later compound floodtide. The fall of tide was called ebba. Consider its later compound ebbtide. Following its Germanic cognates, one of which is the modern German word die Zeit ‘the time,’ the Old English word tíd meant ‘a point in time, due time, fixed time.’ Only later, by about 1340 CE, did the English word tide come to signify the inflow and outflow of moon-and-sun-drawn waters. Possibly English borrowed the meaning from a Middle Low German form like getîde or Middle Dutch ghetîde.

As to neaptide, the origin is lost. The Oxford English Dictionary offers however one of the clearest definitions of neaptide “Designating or relating to a tide occurring just after the first or third quarters of the moon, when the high-water level is lowest and there is least difference between high- and low-water levels.”

A Favorite Verb of Mine
One of my pet water-in-motion words is sluice. One of America’s best comic writers was S. J. Perelman, a word-master who once described taking a drink of whiskey as “sluicing the larynx.” Perelman liked the evasive, placid slippage implied in the verb, with its quasi-onomatopoeic sound. But in fact sluice, noun and verb, is not an imitation of water rushing out of a gate, but is ultimately from the Latin past participle exclusus ‘shut out, cut off’ referring to the gate or valve in a sluice which permits the held-back or cut-off water to flow through the gate at a rate determined by the operator of the sluice-gate.

A sluice is a water dam with an adjustable gate, used particularly in irrigation and in gold mining. Its trip from Latin into English featured a sojourn in Old French as escluse (modern French écluse ). When it was borrowed into the Germanic languages, the word usually lost its hard /c/ and became Middle Dutch slues, Dutch sluis, West Frisian slús, Low German slüse, modern German Schleuse, English sleuss, sleuse, slewse, slowese, slus and finally sluice.

The Most Obscure Water-Movement Word
As we climb the sheer cliff face of new-word acquisition, we must look down now and then to cast a rope back into the cave of obsolete terms and rescue a word from desuetude. Desuetude means ‘passing into a state of disuse, lack of use’ from Latin dēsuēscĕre ‘to not use anymore’ = de Latin negative prefix + suēscĕre ‘to do customarily.’ Such a cast-off gem is the verb to disembogue.

Disembogue? Said of a river or lake, disembogue (dis-em-BOAG) means ‘to empty itself into’ or ‘to flow out of the mouth of a river into the sea or some larger body of water.’ The verb may reverse direction and be used of the sea disemboguing into a narrow creek or as tidal wash flowing up a rivulet.

Yes, I admit that disembogue is now obsolete. Today writers might use the verb to debouch ‘to issue forth from a confined space into a wider space,’ as a river at its estuary might issue forth into a larger body of water like a lake or sea. It’s French from déboucher which contains la bouche ‘the mouth;’ other meanings include unblock, uncork, unstop, break cover.

Disembogue was borrowed into Elizabethan English around 1595 CE from Spanish desembocar ‘to come out of the mouth of a river,’ its Spanish etymology consisting of des, a Spanish intensive, privative prefix that takes the Spanish verb embocar and as desembocar makes it mean ‘flow out of the mouth greatly.’ Embocar ‘to put into the mouth’ = en Spanish ‘in’ + boca Spanish ‘mouth’ from Latin bucca ‘cheek, mouth’ as in the English medical and dental adjective buccal ‘pertaining to the cheek.’

Originally pertaining to rivers, disembogue’s meaning was broadened and generalized by some writers during the 18th and 19th centuries. They used the verb to mean ‘pour forth’ and ‘emerge’ and ‘empty into.’

We kissed bye-bye to this cute little verb in 1871 CE, when, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, it made a final print appearance in a poem by Robert Browning. Thick cough syrup may disembogue into a spoon held up to the revolted face of a croupy child.

But disembogue merits topical revival because it imitates the discharge of sluggish glop into a vast receptacle. One might think of Canada’s polluting tar sands as they disembogue into pipelines carrying ecotoxic sludge toward American refineries, the international transport of such bituminous gunk totally approved by that great Beelzebub of denial, anti-environmentalist Canadian Prime Minister Stephen “There is no such thing as global warming” Harper.

Maelstrom!
This great word, in modern Dutch maalstroom, now in English maelstrom once referred to a specific whirlpool located off the coast of Norway on Dutch shipping maps. Its origin features the Dutch verb malen (German mahlen) ‘to grind up, to turn around quickly (said of roiling sea currents and even of millstones grinding wheat) combined with Dutch stroom ‘stream.’

Maelstrom is aquatically a funnel of doom, sucking into its pelagic vortex all vessels who sail too near its ship-splitting, constrictor gyres. Maelstrom is a latter-day cousin of Charybdis, Homer’s foul "Sister Whirlpool" churning ever in the Straits of Messina, luring Greek sailors to a drowned death with the help of its nymph-turned-sea-monster Scylla.

Now let our spate of water words trickle into defunct eddies and wholly disperse. Long combers of oblivion shall carry our very beach of words far out to sea.

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